29 de jul. de 2006

We closed on our first house (University City) and moved into our temporary apartment. Did the inspection for house #2 (Olivette). Needless to say, little time for blogging in all of uprooting. I can't even read. I am memorizing the complete works of Claudio Rodríguez and 2 books by Lorca. Diván del Tamarit and Romancero gitano. A lot of it is rememorization so it goes fast.

24 de jul. de 2006

21 de jul. de 2006

Add to that a re-occurence of my asthma. For whatever reason, I cannot seem to get enough to eat, either, no matter how much I actually eat. My stress levels are through the roof. I feel I am virtually always on the verge of breaking out in tears, yet somehow it's just that thought, and then nothing comes out.

The storm has knocked power out in much of St. Louis. The apartment we are moving into temporarily between our closing on the old house and the date when our new house is available has no electricity. Neither does the storage facility where we are temporarily putting everything that doesn't fit into the apartment. We are fine here at our first house, having only lost power for a few hours on Wed evening.

18 de jul. de 2006

What if there were a poet who presented terrificly complex textual problems. Inauthentic or lost poems, poems in multiple versions, really bad editions, etc... Then wouldn't the criticims on this poet, after the poet's death, be devoted mostly to sorting out all these problems? The search for the "truth" of the poet Y's work would be largely a search for the best textual practices.

Suppose poet X also dies, leaving her literary estate in perfect order, with few if any significant textual problems. Then the search for the truth of poet X would be entirely interpretive, not textual. Of course, the search for the truth of poet Y's work would also be interpretive, but nobody would ever get to these interpretive questions. Or rather, all interpretive questions would be filtered through the lens of textual controversies. Did he really write Lost Paradise? How much help did he get from his collaborators? is the 1915 edition more reliable than the 1930 edition?

17 de jul. de 2006

Listening to some of George Crumb's Lorca settings, as part of my project of studying Lorca's amazing *after-life* in US and Spanish culture. Joseph Cornell made a film taken from phrase of Lorca's / Guillén's ("Fábula de fuentes"). I love when I discover these magical conjunctions between my favorite artists--like when I discovered Morton Feldman had set to music my favorite text by Samuel Beckett. Things just seem to line up, make sense, making me think my aesthetic world view is totally coherent.

13 de jul. de 2006

Class notes

Modernity in poetry means looking for a particular tradition in the past. It's deeply traditional, radical in its search for roots. That's why it has that super-erudite, scholarly dimension. Blame Ezra Pound. Or Robert Duncan.

García Lorca was something of a scholar of folklore. Not a very good one in the scholarly sense, but with good intuitions, a good understanding of what he was looking for and why it was important. Valente was quite a good scholar of Spanish mysticism. Claudio Rodríguez wrote a master's thesis on children's songs; not that far away in spirit from Lorca's lecture on Spanish lullabies (nanas).

The invention of an imagined past. That's typical of American poets. Schwerner, Pound. Eshleman in his caves. The poet-scholar is a very powerful model up to this day. We worry so much our culture is insufficient that we end up overcompensating. One can imagine someone becoming a sinologist under the influence of Pound, and then, of course, knowing vastly more Chinese than Pound ever did. I was about to say that Pound was the first American poet to be academic specialist in Romance languages, but I was forgetting about Longfellow.

12 de jul. de 2006

I hate the "content mining" mode in criticism. It's not as though I never did it myself. There's a point at which everyone has to do some of it in some fashion, but I don't like it. They call formalism sterile, but what is really sterile is a mode that doesn't attend to form, the living breathing soul of the poem is its rhythms, its particular cadence.

***

The "seven times" rule. The chimney to your gas appliances cannot be more than seven times the diameter of the smallest duct in one of said appliances. Selling a house is not fun. Six and seven hundred dollar repairs lurk around every corner.

6 de jul. de 2006

I also have strong déjá vu. More so when I was younger, maybe. One such experience seemed to last almost ten minutes, but the typical one was for only a few seconds. It's kind of hard to explain to someone who's never had it. It's a sensation that that exact moment has been experienced before. It's not, in other words, deja vu as a mere metaphor for things happening over and over again.

Another psychic peculiarity of mine is that experience seems to be frozen in memory fairly quickly. That is, when I learn something new, it very quickly acquires the feeling of something I've known for a long time. I don't know if there's a term for this.

Every since I was a child, I've had an odd relationship to time. For example, I've always felt that the months from January to June were only one third of the year, and that the half-way point was August. I also feel that the span of time between nine and twelve in the morning is equal to that between twelve and five.

I noticed recently i am a mild synesthesiac. I see colors. Federico García Lorca, for example, is a bright, orangish red. (I don't mean the person himself, but his entire poetic work.) The number 4 is also red, I noticed when doing a sukoku puzzle recently. Even though the actual ink used was blue, the number 4 was still red.

I only recently thought about what color Lorca was. But I have the strong conviction of always having known it.

I say "mild" because most things have no color for me, and my impressions are often rather faint. People with stronger cases than I have might see more colors and with much stronger conviction. I'm not entirely sure.

Páginas

Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."